I just installed Kolibri, and got my local network setup, with no internet access, but the Khan Academy content which I downloaded to Kolibri is visible to the other computers on the local network. I’m very happy to be able to lead a computer programming course in a facility with no internet access! Thank you for all the work you have done to make this available!
Great stuff! I love this programming course. But Kolibri is only showing these lessons:
Intro to programming
What is Programming? (video)
Coloring
The Power of the Docs (video)
(… and only 5 more lessons …)
I downloaded everything available in Kolibri under “Intro to JS: Drawing & Animation”. Is this a work in progress, and I just need to wait for the rest of the content? Or can all the lessons be made available now?
Most of the CS content on the KA site is in the article and scratchpad formats, which are very specific to the rendering on the KA website and not currently supported offline on Kolibri. This is why you’re only seeing a few videos and exercises (the only formats supported).
There has been some previous discussions about this before [1,2], but we haven’t pursued this integration until now as it would require significant dev effort to ensure scratchpads and articles work and are maintainable (in case the data format evolves).
How old are you students? I might be able to suggest some other CS-related content channels that we’re currently working on bringing into Kolibri.
Hi Ivan, thanks for the info. I appreciate the explanation.
Would it be possible to get the other video lessons migrated to Kolibri? One workaround I am looking at is trying to get internet access via cell phone, but the videos are data-intensive. So it would be nice if I could do a mix: videos through Kolibri, and the other content through cell phone internet access.
Would it be possible to get the other video lessons migrated to Kolibri?
We already have all the standard video-videos (at least the ones that were available when we last rand the integration script, which is every 3-6 months). I believe what you’re referring to are the scratchpad-videos like this one, which we have skipped because they are of kind scratchpad. However, some of them seem to also be available as regular videos (see Watch on Youtube link in the bottom right), so we might be able to pull those in (assuming all of them have a youtube-equivalent version).
Let me get back to you on that by the end of next week. I need to discuss with my colleague who knows the KA content integration script better. We were actually discussing dropping the CS and programming topics altogether since they are missing content and causing confusion, but perhaps if we had all the video-videos and scratchpad-videos combined it would be worth keeping the topics (e.g. for your mixed-connectivity use case).
As for other CS-related materials, the only thing we have in the public library is
Blockly Games which is pretty awesome introduction to coding via sever simple game-like challenges. It might be too basic for your students, but they can at least have some fun + solutions sneakily introduce .js syntax so could be a good way in.
Here two other channels that are currently in the works but have not been released yet (still undergoing QA):
CSpathshala channel, which consists of PDFs and slides that are super well done. The content is aligned to the grade levels in India, so you’ll have to look through the curriculum doc to know what the US-equivalent grade levels and topics you might want to use.
GoalKicker Tech Books the best of discussions extracted from stackoverflow organized by topics. Most of the books are probably too advanced, but if you choose one specific technology (e.g. JavaScript or SQL) then the book on that subject might come in handy.
Hi Gary. To followup on our discussion — we’ll be looking into the KA API to see if videos are available for the scratchpad-video content kind, but it might take some time (think months), so for the moment you shouldn’t depend on those videos being available.
Ideally we should make both articles and scratchpad components work to make the entire CS sections of the KA website usable offline, but I can’t offer any timeframe on when we’ll attempt this and if it will be possible. It sounds like we’ll need a js-ninja to make it work. I’ll keep you posted if there are any updates.